What The Study Did: Using insurance claims data, the change in screening rates for breast, colorectal and prostate cancers during the COVID-19 pandemic were estimated as well as the overall decline in cancer screening last year among the U.S. population. Authors: Ronald Chen, M.D., M.P.H., of the University of Kansas in Kansas City, is the corresponding author. To access the embargoed study:  Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/  (doi:10.1001/jamaoncol.2021.0884) Editor's Note: The article includes conflicts of interest disclosures. Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of interest and financial disclosures, and funding and support. INFORMATION: Media ...

What The Study Did: This case series investigates the frequency and type of SARS-CoV-2 nasopharyngeal test complications in Helsinki, Finland. Authors: Anni Koskinen, M.D., Ph.D., of the Helsinki University Hospital in Finland, is the corresponding author. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ (doi:10.1001/jamaoto.2021.0715) Editor's Note: Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of interest and financial disclosures, and funding and support. INFORMATION: Media advisory: The full article is linked to this news release. Embed this link to provide your readers free access to the full-text article This ...

What The Study Did: Researchers investigated whether spending  a year aboard the International Space Station was associated with worsening of spaceflight-associated structural changes to the eye. Authors: Brandon R. Macias, Ph.D., of the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, is the corresponding author. To access the embargoed study:  Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ (doi:10.1001/jamaophthalmol.2021.0931) Editor's Note: The article includes conflicts of interest and funding/support disclosures. Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author ...

What The Study Did: The association between exposure to antibiotics before birth and during the first year of life and the development of eczema during childhood was evaluated among children in Sweden. Authors: Mwenya Mubanga, M.D., Ph.D., of the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, is the corresponding author. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ (doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2021.5245) Editor's Note: The article includes conflicts of interest and funding/support disclosures. Please see the article for additional information, ...

An experimental treatment produced improvements in cognitive function and language in patients with fragile X syndrome, according to study results published on April 29 in Nature Medicine. Fragile X syndrome (known as FXS for short) is the most common known genetic cause of autism and the most common cause of inherited intellectual disability. "These results offer hope for patients with fragile X syndrome and their families," said Elizabeth Berry-Kravis, MD, PhD, a pediatric neurologist at Rush University Medical Center and principal investigator of the study. "The majority of clinical outcome measures were in favor of the drug. These measures included performance-based ...

Researchers in Japan have compiled a first-of-its-kind genetic database for autoimmune and autoinflammatory diseases. This resource will allow experts to more deeply understand how immune disorders develop and plan future drug discovery projects. Scientists also hope this atlas of immune-related genome data may eventually be applied to investigations of infectious diseases like COVID-19. "To understand diseases, a deep comprehension of the function of genetic variants is essential. With this data set, we can connect the data about changes to DNA sequence associated with a disease to genes and cell types that are important for disease pathogenesis," said University of Tokyo Project Research Associate Mineto Ota, M.D., Ph.D., a clinical rheumatologist and ...

Particularly sensitive to chemical modifications, messenger RNAs (mRNAs) are molecules responsible for transmitting the information encoded in our genome, allowing for the synthesis of proteins, which are necessary for the functioning of our cells. Two teams from the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, in collaboration with the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), have focused on a specific type of chemical modification - called methylation - of mRNA molecules in the small worm Caenorhabditis elegans. They found that methylation on a particular sequence of an mRNA leads to its degradation ...

A survey of over 32,000 caregivers of youth in Chicago Public Schools found that around a quarter of children and adolescents were described as stressed, anxious, angry or agitated after pandemic-related school closures and the switch to remote learning. Around a third of youth were described by caregivers as lonely and only one-third were described as having positive social and peer relationships. Across the board, caregivers reported significantly worse psychological well-being after school closures as compared to before. Findings were published in the journal JAMA Network Open. "Caregivers are reporting that the pandemic and school closures have taken a substantial emotional toll on their children and adolescents," ...

URBANA, Ill. - With threats of water scarcity complicating the need to feed a growing global population, it is more important than ever to get crop irrigation right. Overwatering can deplete local water supplies and lead to polluted runoff, while underwatering can lead to sub-optimal crop performance. Yet few farmers use science-based tools to help them decide when and how much to water their crops. A new University of Illinois led study identifies obstacles and solutions to improve performance and adoption of irrigation decision support tools at the field scale. "We wanted to offer our perspective on how to achieve field-scale precision irrigation with the most recent and advanced technologies on data collection, plant water stress, modeling, ...

Researchers at Karolinska Institutet and the Public Health Agency of Sweden have studied newborn babies whose mothers tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 during pregnancy or childbirth. The results show that although babies born of test-positive mothers are more likely to be born early, extremely few were infected with COVID-19. The study, which is published in the esteemed journal JAMA, supports the Swedish recommendation not to separate mother and baby after delivery. The population-based study comprised 92 per cent of all neonates - almost 90,000 births - in Sweden during the first year of the pandemic (11 March 2020 to 31 January 2021), making it one of the largest datasets in the field to date. The results show a slightly higher level of morbidity ...

During the first wave of the corona pandemic, 36 per cent fewer men were diagnosed with prostate cancer in Sweden than in previous years. On the other hand, the number of patients receiving curative treatment for prostate cancer was unaffected. This is shown by a new register study led by Uppsala University researchers, whose results are published in the Scandinavian Journal of Urology. "We think the number of cases diagnosed fell because, early on, the Public Health Agency of Sweden urged older people to minimise their social contacts and, by the same token, refrain from non-urgent ...

Microalgae of the dinoflagellate group are known for their ability to survive in other animal cells. These tiny single-cell organisms have engaged in mutually beneficial relationships with corals since primeval times. By passing on critical nutrients to their hosts, dinoflagellates allow corals to thrive even in barren areas. A research team from the Centre for Organismal Studies (COS) of Heidelberg University recently discovered that such symbioses within the cell essentially depend on the ability of the algae to suppress the immune system of their host cell and thereby avoid being "spit ...

Nearly half of adults in the United States have hypertension, a condition that raises the risk for heart disease and stroke, which are leading causes of death in the U. S. At Baylor College of Medicine, Dr. David J. Durgan and his colleagues are dedicated to better understand hypertension, in particular the emerging evidence suggesting that disruption of the gut microbiota, known as gut dysbiosis, can have adverse effects on blood pressure. "Previous studies from our lab have shown that the composition of the gut microbiota in animal models of hypertension, such as the SHRSP (spontaneously hypertensive stroke-prone ...

The outbreak of COVID-19 has revealed the widespread effects a pandemic can have on all spheres of life from health, to social life, to the economy. The main thrust of efforts to control the spread has been to decrease the reproduction rate to flatten the curve of the total number of infected individuals per day in order to reduce overload on the health system. The most widely implemented response to the exponential growth of the infection has been widespread quarantine and lockdown. While isolation is an effective tool to decelerate the spread, repeatedly imposing complete ...

Small and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises (SMEs) face many obstacles and difficulties (economic, technical, cultural, etc.) when it comes to implementing Industry 4.0. "These are transition processes that are economically costly, and in which SMEs often come up against technical and cultural problems, as they are not cognizant of how to make this transition, or of the benefits their companies stand to gain by implementing Industry 4.0," explained the UPV/EHU pre-doctoral researcher Víctor Ramírez-Durán. While several pieces of work address the incorporating ...

NEW YORK, NY (April 29, 2021) - In a new resource for the scientific community, published today in Nature Biotechnology, researchers in the lab of Neville Sanjana, PhD, at the New York Genome Center (NYGC) and New York University (NYU) developed CRISPR-sciATAC, a novel integrative genetic screening platform that jointly captures CRISPR gene perturbations and single-cell chromatin accessibility genome-wide. With this technology, they profile changes in genome organization and create a large-scale atlas of how loss of individual chromatin-altering enzymes impacts the human genome. The new method harnesses the programmability of the gene editing system CRISPR to knock-out ...

Exploring extreme environments can put significant operational challenges on the engineering systems we depend upon to safely explore and at times operate within. Within high-value and safety-critical applications, such as space exploration or sub-surface drilling, the extreme and at times dynamic operating conditions within the environment, can make it challenging to understand the life expectancy of critical components and sub-systems. Hence, it's a highly complex and at times impossible situation to accurate understand therefore predict. To have safe, resilient and economically viable operations within these challenge environments, it is vital ...

Researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine have discovered one way in which SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, hijacks human cell machinery to blunt the immune response, allowing it to establish infection, replicate and cause disease. In short, the virus' genome gets tagged with a special marker by a human enzyme that tells the immune system to stand down, while at the same time ramping up production of the surface proteins that SARS-CoV-2 uses as a "doorknob" to enter cells. The study, published April ...

The burden of student loans in the U.S. continues to grow unabatedly, currently accounting for a total of $1.7 trillion in household debt among nearly 45 million borrowers. "The introduction of income-based repayment over the past decade has made student loans rather complicated products," Paolo Guasoni of Dublin City University said. As borrowers navigate this complex process, they face long-term consequences; people with student debt are less likely to own homes or become entrepreneurs, and generally postpone their enrollment in graduate or professional studies. Though legislative reform is necessary to combat this problem on a grand scale, individual borrowers can take steps to ...

Hydrogen as a clean, renewable alternative to fossil fuels is part of a sustainable-energy future, and very much already here. However, lingering concerns about flammability have limited widespread use of hydrogen as a power source for electric vehicles. Previous advances have minimized the risk, but new research from the University of Georgia now puts that risk in the rearview mirror. Hydrogen vehicles can refuel much more quickly and go farther without refueling than today's electric vehicles, which use battery power. But one of the final hurdles to hydrogen power is securing a safe method for detecting hydrogen leaks. A new study published in Nature Communications documents an inexpensive, spark-free, optical-based hydrogen sensor that is more sensitive ...

Study Take-Aways Unprecedented novel discoveries have implications for characterizing biodiversity for all life, conservation, and human health and disease. o This finding provides novel avenues of research to increase immune defenses, particularly relevant for emerging infectious diseases, such as the current COVID-19 pandemic. The flagship paper presented whole genome sequence analyses of 16 vertebrate species to illustrate high quality, near error free, near complete, low cost reference genome assemblies. o Though near 400 species have been sequenced at some level, the quality today reflects ...

Alzheimer's disease is characterized by the abnormal accumulation and spread of the tau protein in the brain. An international study can now show how tau spreads according to four distinct patterns that lead to different symptoms with different prognoses of the affected individuals. The study was published in Nature Medicine. "In contrast to how we have so far interpreted the spread of tau in the brain, these findings indicate that tau pathology in the brain varies according to at least four distinct patterns. This would suggest that Alzheimer's is an even more heterogeneous disease than previously thought. We now have reason to reevaluate the concept of typical Alzheimer's, and in the long ...

As state and local policymakers and politicians made the decision to enact stay-at-home orders last March in response to the coronavirus pandemic, a recent study found that more stringent public health measures put in place directly correlated with lower virus case numbers during the first two months of the pandemic. The study, "More Stringent Measures Against Covid-19 Are Associated With Lower Cases and Deaths in Florida and Miami-Dade," was recently published in the American Journal of Emergency Medicine. Utilizing The New York Times' GitHub repository of cases and deaths and the COVID-19 Government Response Stringency Index developed by Oxford University's Blavatnik School of Government for the ...

The image of rows of chairs and desks facing a teacher at a blackboard has been a reality for decades. However, research reveals that this way of organizing the classroom furniture in schools is not the best way for favouring the learning process. Especially if the needs of 21st-century students are taken into account, who, according to the OECD, require a social environment that fosters autonomy, flexibility, decision-making capacity and the connection of knowledge by individual students or through teamwork. It is also the opinion of 6 out of every 10 teachers that changing the ...

HOUSTON - (April 29, 2021) - In one of the first studies of its kind, medical and engineering researchers have shown wearable devices that continuously monitor blood sugar provide new insights into the progression of Type 2 diabetes among at-risk Hispanic/Latino adults. The findings by researchers from Sansum Diabetes Research Institute (SDRI) and Rice University are available online this week in EClinicalMedicine, an open-access clinical journal published by The Lancet. "The fresh look at the glucose data sheds new light on disease progression, which could have a direct impact on better management," said Rice study co-author Ashutosh Sabharwal, professor and department chair in electrical and ...